I wouldn’t be surprised if the initiative comes from the OG dev of the game, who is Italian: the efforts we go through since 1996 (all I can remember) to avoid ads and popups are of biblical proportions.
I can remember my father taking the PC away from me as soon as he saw I was exposed to one, going “I can take that away, it will be a minute”. It wasn’t a minute.
Awesome, that’s what I was hoping to hear. I miss the olden days when it was more realistic that you had to/could work for your car, and slowly upgrade and save up. Now that isn’t even believable in a video game world anymore, it’s been replaced with winning cars in a lottery, the only believable way for people to afford a nice car nowadays. Hehe.
“Now, I understand why so few companies have attempted to develop a life simulation game. The challenge isn’t just additive the more you try to build—it’s exponential. At a certain point, finding bugs in this vast world we’ve created feels like playing tag with invisible ghosts.”
He’s not bragging; it’s honesty. I’m thankful he is sharing the experience. I know totally what he’s talking about. I remember trying to make a simulation of reality in the wc3 map editor in elementary school. Add the weather so the plants grow. Tie growth variables also in to deer eating them. wolves eat the deer. So everything needs hunger variables. But already we start having the ‘exponential growth’ he is talking about: because what about the Weather and the Deer? And the Weather and Wolves? Add aspect of the world for one type of object (weather for plants), and suddenly you have to figure out how or whether it relates to everything else you have (Deer and Wolves). Now let’s say we add villagers and Structures. Every time we add something, we have more nodes to consider the interrelations of.
It’s easy when there are few systems and few types of things (like a cardgame of creatures with atk and def), but it escalates quick and does exactly what he’s saying the more systems you try to accurately include and farther toward ‘full life sim’.
So im just a noob, but I see clearly this is what he is conveying to us. (probably cuz i tried a similar path in elementary school. if i remember correctly i ran in to this same issue, scale was too big too big project and i switched to something else. it exponentialed quick; just like he says)
edit: i bet he wasnt brave as much as did not forsee the exponentialness aspect and wanting to aim high caused him to fall in to it
Dwarf Fortress goes that deep. They once had to fix a problem where cats died from alcohol poisoning. Dwarfs in a bar would spill their drinks, the cats would walk through the puddles and subsequently lick their paws to clean themselves. It's crazy!
Yes that was the bug. After all it makes sense that cats would clean their paws and get a bit of alcohol in their bodies. Kind of bizarre to think though that the system was sophisticated enough to track grooming behavior but not quantity.
It really goes to show how stupid computers actually are. They just follow your instructions regardless of how insane they may be
Reminds me of Rimworld and the fact that, if there is no other accessible entities on the map with a nutrition stat, children and animals will b-line for booze that raiders drop and get hammered. I can’t count the number of Muffalo, dogs, and cats that I have had which end up with an alcohol tolerance hedif out of nowhere.
Making a system like this one day is my dream. I'm not in game dev and I'm probably never going to make a playable game but I naively believe that if you organize this well enough in advance, the moment it starts clicking together would be amazing. If you define all the individual actors in a flexible enough way, eventually the simulation should just 'click' and start functioning on its own, right? :P
For example, you dont need to code the specific wolves+rain interaction - you just need to code "if vulnerable/tired - find shelter" and have rain affect the living creatures in that way. It doesn't matter if there are deer or sheep in the area, "if wolf hungry" logic should just say "find something with meat to eat nearby".
Then again I know enough about programming to know this is extremely naive and it'd probably be a million times more difficult if I ever got around to doing it. I don't even know where I fall on the dunner-kruger graph yet, but it's an interesting thing to think about for me.
Oh I empathize with that. I tried unity/godot and code part would always be fun and easy, I love that... models, assets, animations break my brain however. I wish I could just not bother with them but it's such an important part of the experience, arguably the most important one
I’ve read from a few people who’ve done similar sorts of things that the solution to this problem is to just have everything track everything to begin with. Hunger level, heart rate, mood, everything you can possibly think of to track, and then just have everything else inherit from that global class. A lot of the values will be zero for some objects, but that’s okay, after all a storage crate doesn’t need a mood, both at some point in the future maybe you want to add an emotional box, and your code will definitely handle it now. Otherwise you have to go back in and alter everything every time you make a slight change.
A more complicated but ultimately faster approach is using a structure like an Entity Component System. You build an entity (deer, person, plant) out of components that are just data (health, hunger, mood), and then each type of component has a corresponding system that updates all the components at once based on other values. It’s somewhat similar, but you save space on unnecessary components not being added, and it packs the data together in way that is faster for the computer to iterate through.
I made a tower defense map in the Starcraft map editor when I was a kid , but it was based off of anti air rather than anti ground like the other TD maps at the time. I got it working pretty damn well (at least IMO) but I didn’t have internet at the time and that was on my dads work laptop so it sadly got lost.
I don’t think I could recreate that now if I tried, crazy what you can do as a bored kid with too much time.
That’s cool! I made tons of stuff but most of it never got finished or released cause I just kept starting the next thing. Probably the wildest thing I ever made was a prototype for a sidescrolling platformer in wc3. It had keyboard movement and ability usage, jumping, a heart counter in the top left, enemies, powerups… It was kind of janky but it worked surprisingly well considering what I built it in.
<3 both of u. I was Pixie_Tails on US east and west and in one of the big mapmaking guilds on east. I look back and think wc3 was the mentally healthiest part of my childhood. My most fun thing was a game like dota but with a huge natural map and a minute at the start for everyone to choose their castle locations. Like you could choose to be on a hill, along a river, etc. Then there were diff biomes to choose your hero from and the hero choices spawned like pkmn and there were rares. and choosing base unit types. then it became like dota where units spawned at castles and attackmoved to other castles. Was epic.
My weakness was unit and ability balancing since it didnt interest me so i never did it.
anyway, we thought up and made these as kids. i think that’s the coolest thing
That’s so cool sounding too! I made so many half baked ideas honestly. Tower defenses, single player campaigns (way too ambitious ones), and so many more. It really taught me a lot about proper game dev honestly.
God damn, that sounds awesome! Those map editors were seriously impressive for their time, so many cool things you could do with them. I also liked making “campaign” maps but with hero units and harder AI (SC base ai was too easy but you could set it to be harder through the map editor) or those “maze” maps where you have to keep the units you start out with alive through a bunch of different encounters.
For real. I had a project to make two full since player campaigns and it was waaaaaay too ambitious. I’ve always been hopelessly ambitious with game dev stuff and I still am honestly 😅
So fun to hear everyone chiming about doing this back then.
I respect the hustle, but as a professional gameplay programmer : the fuck did you expect ? Piling systems upon systems does indeed increase the game logic’s complexity exponentially. Probably a big reason why there are so few (good) immersive sims even though it’s quite the popular genre.
I know multiple people who complain about every release and then buy it, preferably both versions. A few even complaint there’s no third edition to buy anymore.
If anything, GF could reduce their quality even more.
Then there’s me: not buying the console or the game, playing it emulated at better fps and higher resolution for like 20 minutes just to say “I knew it” and never touching the game again.
I was disappointed with X/Y and gave them one last chance to change course.
The disappointing dungeons of X/Y had been replaced by nothing by straight lines with occasional fancy camera angles. The utter disgrace that was Z Cave as a super (only) dungeon was more than anything Sun/Moon offered.
For a game series meant to be about exploring and discovering monsters to collect, they’ve really let the exploration/discovery side down. Holding my console upside down is cool and all that, but gimmicks to sell strategy guides are no subsidy for actual explorable environments to lead to dynamic, emergent gameplay experiences.
Really want to make my take on a monster capture world explorer. I think there’s a lot of space for a spiritual successor to Pokémon.
They make a console that is underpowered but is still marketable because of its uniqueness, then they make first party games that require better performance than the console can deliver.
Pokémon is not a first party game, it’s developed by Game Freaks. And the Switch isn’t underpowered for this kind of games, there are lots of better looking games on it, such as Breath of the Wild, which is a launch title. Game Freaks is a terrible studio who can’t make a game run smoothly even with GameCube graphics.
Because graphics are the most important part of a game?
If the games are fun to play who cares if the graphics are bad? Scarlet and Violet were the best pokemon games since P:LA and that was the best since Gen 5.
Based on the limited information we’ve gotten about ZA there’s no reason as of yet to doubt that it won’t be comparable to P:LA and S&V in terms of enjoyability.
Complaining about the graphics of pokemon games or the bugginess of pokemon games is like complaining about CoD being an FPS or Assassin’s Creed having traversable terrain or Souls-likes being hard. At this point it’s a staple of the franchise with 40 games between the mainline games and major spinoffs establishing a trend of the games being thoroughly buggy messes and/or having shit graphics. There is absolutely no reason to expect any of that to change and constantly hearing complaints about it with every new game is getting fucking old.
While graphics generally aren’t important, they do become a glaring problem when the engine is poorly written. Pokémon Sword and Shield shed light on this problem because it was designed as an 3D open world game, meaning attention to detail was paramount. It needed to feel lived in, much like Breath of the Wild. Unfortunately, we got a barren and flat landscape that feels like it was ripped straight out of the DS.
I don’t disagree that the graphics could and probably should have been better. I do disagree with the idea that it’s anything more than a minor annoyance with no meaningful impact on the game.
However, regardless of what I think about it, my point was that at this point in the franchise, Gamefreak, the Pokemon Company, and Nintendo have demonstrated repeatedly since the very first game that optimization, stability, graphical fidelity, and any semblance of good development practices are not something they’re willing to commit to. Expecting that to change at this point is unreasonable and continuing to complain about it is demonstrably unproductive and just introduces pointless negativity into the pokemon community.
Until Sword and Shield, the games weren’t known to be ugly, buggy messes. People have, and continue to, praise the 2D pixel art of previous generations. Sun and Moon is an odd middle ground as some people started to not like the 3D direction, but thought it’d improve on a more powerful console, like the Switch. I don’t think it’s correct saying this is a staple of pokemon games. It’s a staple of modern pokemon games, which I absolutely disagree about the last 2 entries being the best. Far from it.
I was more thinking of the N64 and GameCube games (Stadium 1&2, Colloseum, and XD Gale of Darkness) when referencing older games with poor graphics specifically. All four of those games were graphically inferior to other titles on the same consoles.
However, every single release has been plagued by bugs that can result in completely corrupted save data, softlocks, and a wide variety of other unexpected behaviors. Major examples being MissingNo and the other glitch pokemon, bad eggs, a wide variety of exploitable, but potentially save corrupting bugs like the infinite item glitches in gens 1-3, and a whole host of bugs that break how moves are supposed to work in battle.
Hell, shinies were originally a graphical bug in gen 2.
gamesradar.com
Aktywne